I would prefer not to.Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener
Every music with a subculture attached claims to be against the market. Black metal is the one that built the claim into the manufacturing. The refusal is not a lyric or a stated position in an interview; it is printed on the sleeve as a number, one of five hundred, and once those five hundred are gone the record is gone, and the label that made it will tell you so without apology. Understanding why is most of the way to understanding the chapter this belongs to.
The position had a catalogue number
It starts with a label set up in 1987 under the name Posercorpse Music, renamed Deathlike Silence Productions, and run by Euronymous of Mayhem until his death in 1993. The first record it put out was Deathcrush, in August 1987, in an edition of one thousand hand numbered copies wrapped in a sleeve of the most aggressive pink available. Then came the detail that gives the whole enterprise away: the catalogue numbers ran as ANTI-MOSH, aimed directly at Earache Records in England, whose numbers ran as MOSH and whose bands were selling in quantities nobody in Norway could approach.
A catalogue number is an accounting convention. Turning one into an insult aimed at a rival company is a statement that the accounting is the enemy, and every practice described below follows from that one gesture: the label exists to release records that could not be released otherwise, not to sell as many as possible, and the difference is not a matter of degree.
What a limited press actually does
Cut through the mythology and the small edition performs four separate jobs, and most labels are running all four at once without ever saying so.
- It matches the money available. Nobody with three hundred pounds presses a thousand records, and a great deal of what looks like doctrine is arithmetic wearing a hood.
- It filters the audience. A person who finds out about a tape three months late and cannot buy it learns to pay attention earlier, which is a training programme disguised as a shortage.
- It makes the record an object rather than a product. A hand numbered sleeve says a person counted these out, and the copy in your hands is number 214 of 300 rather than an item in unlimited supply.
- It refuses growth on purpose. A label that will not repress is a label that has decided how large it intends to become, which almost no business in any other field is permitted to do.
A great deal of what looks like doctrine is arithmetic wearing a hood.
The fourth is the one that separates this genre from every other underground. Punk labels repressed when a record sold. Death metal labels repressed. A black metal label frequently does not, and the reason given is that the pressing was made for the people who were paying attention at the time and that anybody else can find a copy or go without. It is an unfriendly position and it is meant to be.
The vocabulary that grew up around all this is usually read as moral and it is better read as economic. Poser, in the usage that ran through the fanzines and the letters, does not mean a person with insincere beliefs. It means a person who arrived once the thing was being sold, and it is a charge about timing and about money rather than about the soul. True, its opposite, means present before there was anything to gain. Once you read the two words that way the whole apparatus of small editions, unreadable logos and refused interviews stops looking like theatre and starts looking like an entry test with a date on it.
Saying no as a working method
The clearest living statement of it came from Darkthrone, a band that has turned down offers to perform for three decades and keeps producing records anyway.
We have said no to being wealthy for years and years.
Nocturno Culto of Darkthrone, in Metal Injection, 2022
That is not a complaint and it is not a boast. It is a description of a repeated transaction in which the band was offered money in exchange for doing something it did not want to do and declined, over and over, for longer than most of its audience has been alive. The same instinct shows up in ordinary life in ways that are genuinely funny. Fenriz was put on a Liberal Party list in his own municipality of Oppegård, campaigned with a photograph of himself holding his cat Nugatti above the words asking people not to vote for him, and was elected in 2016 anyway.
Where the position eats itself
Scarcity has a price, and the market found it immediately. A tape of two hundred copies that sells out on the day of release appears within a week on the resale sites at four times its cover price, and the person who benefits is not the band, not the label and not anybody who cares about the music. The limited press was designed to keep the record out of the hands of people who were not paying attention. What it reliably does instead is transfer money to whoever bought fastest.
Worse, the device got professionalised. Labels with staff and distribution now sell the die hard edition, the wooden box, the numbered patch and the coloured vinyl at four times the ordinary price, and the language of scarcity that came out of a bedroom operation in 1987 is a standard line item on a release schedule. A genre that turned refusal into a catalogue prefix now finds refusal sold back to it as an upgrade tier. That is not the fault of the bands who still press three hundred and stop. It does mean the number on the sleeve no longer proves anything on its own.
It is worth being blunt about what the position costs the people holding it. A musician who will not tour has no income from the only part of this business that reliably pays, which means a job, and the records get made in the evenings and on holiday. Nobody in this genre is putting money aside from it. The bands that have made a living from black metal would fill a small room, the ones that have not would fill a stadium, and a fair number of the records everybody agrees are essential were paid for by shift work. That is the invoice attached to the doctrine, and it has been settled quietly for thirty five years by people who never mention it.
What is left of it, and what it is worth
Strip away the merchandising and a real position survives underneath, and it is narrower than the slogans but harder to argue with. It is the refusal to change the music in order to sell more of it. Not the refusal of money, which most of these people would take if it arrived without conditions, and not the refusal of an audience, since every band puts the record up for sale. The refusal is specifically of the edit: the shorter song, the cleaner mix, the chorus, the tour supporting somebody the band does not respect, the interview given to a magazine that will misrepresent it.
Measured that way the record of this genre is better than almost any other. Bands here have consistently made the version of the album they wanted and accepted the smaller result, decade after decade, and the catalogue is the evidence. Whether the limited edition serves that or merely decorates it is a question the underground argues about constantly and has never settled.
The same refusal is audible in the recordings themselves, and nowhere more plainly than in the singing, which was built from the start to be unusable by anybody looking for a wider audience. That is a subject of its own: how Black Metal Vocals Got That Shape is the story of a deliberate decision, taken early and held since, to make the most human element of the music the least accommodating thing in it.
